Occasional Papers eBook

good and true and fruitful in His life would have perished,
and have been lost in Judaea. And the belief in
the Resurrection M. Renan thinks due to an hour of
over-excited fancy in a woman agonized by sorrow and
affection. When we are presented with an hypothesis
on the basis of intrinsic probability, we cannot but
remember that the power of delusion and self-deception,
though undoubtedly shown in very remarkable instances,
must yet be in a certain proportion to what it originates
and produces, and that it is controlled by the numerous
antagonistic influences of the world. Crazy women
have founded superstitions; but we cannot help thinking
that it would be more difficult than M. Renan supposes
for crazy women to found a world-wide religion for
ages, branching forth into infinite forms, and tested
by its application to all varieties of civilisation,
and to national and personal character. M. Renan
points to La Salette. But the assumption would
be a bold one that the La Salette people could have
invented a religion for Christendom which would stand
the wear of eighteen centuries, and satisfy such different
minds. Pious frauds, as he says, may have built
cathedrals. But you must take Christianity for
what it has proved itself to be in its hard and unexampled
trial. To start an order, a sect, an institution,
even a local tradition or local set of miracles, on
foundations already laid, is one thing; it is not the
same to be the spring of the most serious and the
deepest of moral movements for the improvement of
the world, the most unpretending and the most careless
of all outward form and show, the most severely searching
and universal and lasting in its effects on mankind.
To trace that back to the Teacher without the intervention
of the belief in the Resurrection is manifestly impossible.
We know what He is said to have taught; we know what
has come of that teaching in the world at large; but
if the link which connects the two be not a real one,
it is vain to explain it by the dreams of affection.
It was not a matter of a moment or an hour, but of
days and weeks continually; not the assertion of one
imaginative mourner or two, but of a numerous and
variously constituted body of people. The story,
if it was not true, was not delusion, but imposture.
We certainly cannot be said to know much of what happens
in the genesis of religions. But that between
such a teacher and such teaching there should intervene
such a gigantic falsehood, whether imposture or delusion,
is unquestionably one of the hardest violations of
probability conceivable, as well as one of the most
desperate conclusions as regards the capacity of mankind
for truth. Few thoughts can be less endurable
than that the wisest and best of our race, men of
the soberest and most serious tempers, and most candid
and judicial minds, should have been the victims and
dupes of the mad affection of a crazy Magdalen, of
“ces touchantes demoniaques, ces pecheresses
converties, ces vraies fondatrices du Christianisme.”
M. Renan shrinks from solving such a question by the
hypothesis of conscious fraud. To solve it by
sentiment is hardly more respectful either to the world
or to truth.